This continues at Williams for a few years, until people panic and realize they don't have too many bankable life skills to get a real job. However, everyone is, or is surrounded by affluent, successful, career-oriented people. So they look around to find one of those successful career paths that are still open to them. Unless they are majoring in math/sciences (Williams has a 10% math major population, which is very high compared to the US average), or have already begun the pre-med track, the only clear avenues that aren't blocked off by their past decisions are consulting->MBA, and law school.
Disclosure: I attended Williams. About 25% of students double major. I started off with a clear "1 major for me, 1 for life skills" path, and intended to major in CS and Music. At the end of freshman year I realized I was an exceedingly mediocre composer, and switched my second to Economics (if that seems like a cynical career move, at the time I thought economics was the path to becoming Hari Seldon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asi...)
Heck, even the Valley isn't immune to this phenomenon. Taking your CS degree to Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan then lateraling to a VC fund after a few years is probably, adjusted for risk, the highest return career path in the Valley.
Law school has been the "go to" graduate option for the "soft" sciences for a long time, since there is no requisite pre-law undergrad. It's also led to a surplus of Law graduates with no job prospects.
>"Is "college education" a proxy for gradschool ?"
I believe that is actually teaching college courses. But I could be wrong.
However, top humanities and arts students with very good grades and LSAT scores can still dramatically improve their earning prospects by attending an elite law school. I suspect that quite a few Williams students fit that description.
MBAs are a harder option, because while they don't strictly require any one major, it can be harder to gain the experience MBA programs value with a very unmarketable major.
This is a harsh but kind of funny dilbert...
Whole-heartedly agree. I'm an economics guy myself, so I didn't intend to denigrate the degree choice. Top students will succeed no matter what; but the law grad outlook (or lack of) is no joke.
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230445860...
In my undergraduate thesis I looked at what causes schools to graduate more or less economics majors, and the most important factor is the existence of a business school at the university. If a school does not have a business school, like at a lot of top ranked liberal arts schools, students flock to the economics major.
As a former economics PhD student, I've seen first hand the breadth of fields that economists end up in. From professors in a law school, to FTC economists, to public policy and healthcare, economists will always end up in a diverse set of fields. That's the nature of economics -- it does not teach you a set of facts. Instead, it teaches you how to solve problems. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, every industry has problems that boil down to raw economics.